White Mississippi senator in runoff jokes about 'public hanging' [View all]

JACKSON, Miss. — A newly published video shows a white Republican U.S. senator in Mississippi praising someone by saying: “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who faces a black Democratic challenger in a Nov. 27 runoff, said Sunday that her Nov. 2 remark was “an exaggerated expression of regard” for a friend who invited her to speak, and “any attempt to turn this into a negative connotation is ridiculous.”

Mississippi has a bitter history of racially motivated lynchings of black people. The NAACP website says that between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States, and nearly 73 percent of the victims were black. It says Mississippi had 581 during that time, the most of any state.

Hyde-Smith is challenged by former congressman and former U.S. agriculture secretary Mike Espy.

Read more: https://www.pressherald.com/2018/11/12/white-mississippi-senator-in-runoff-jokes-about-public-hanging/